During the christmas holidays I decided to have a play around with writing Chrome extensions, however it wasn't until now that I've decided to write a quick introduction post about it.

The extension I wrote gives a simple overview, with controls, of torrents for Deluge - Deluge is a multi-platform torrent application written in Python. You can see the name, size, progress, ETA and current speed of the torrents along with some actions: moving torrents up and down; pausing and resuming; toggling auto-managed, basically if they should obey the queue rules; and since version 0.5 you can now delete torrents, with the option to delete just the torrent file or the data and torrent file.

Here's a screenshot:

Requirements

The extension currently requires the 1.2.x series (I have yet to look into the 1.3 series). You also need to have the webUI running. Once installed, on the options page, enter the address of the webUI and the port it's running on. You may also enter the password which will do the initial login for you, however, this isn't required and you can login to the webUI manually if you wish.

Getting it

The extension can be found on the Chrome extension page. Please feel free to give a rating! =)

For developer folk the code can be found on github, I'm more than happy to accept patches for fixes, improvements and new features.

It's always a good idea to backup your data; it gives you protection from data loss and hardware failure. If you host sensitive data, or applications for customers, it's a good idea to encrypt the backups, ensuring their secure and can be safely kept just about anywhere.

There are lots of backup scripts, solutions and services around: Rsync, s3sync, Rdiff-backup, Jungle Disk and Duplicity being just a few. After trying a few of them I decided to go with Duplicity for my Linode VPS; it provided a simple, yet powerful, way of doing encrypted backups.

Duplicity uses librsync and GnuPG to incrementally encrypt archives of files that have changed since the last backup. You can transfer the backups using a whole range of protocols: ftp, imap, rsync, s3 and scp for example - I store backups on my local file server, however, due to the encrypted nature they could easily be stored on something like Amazon's S3.

The MAN pages have more information on the actions, options and URL formats for duplicity, it also provides several examples.

If there is one thing that annoys me about having to fill the car up with petrol it's other people! Their inefficiency, down right slowness and stupidity all add to this already laborious task. I have written down some top tips for these idiots.

Tip one: Use the right damn pump!

There are a select few (quite a small minority have this level of idiocy) who, instead of waiting maybe a minute or two in a queue for the correct pump. Where the pump is positioned the same side as their fuel cap, they will of course, without a moments hesitation use the pump that is on the wrong side for their fuel cap. I mean christ, how stupid! Yes clever you! By pushing into another queue and using the pump the other side of the forecourt you have saved yourself minutes of waiting in a queue, genius. Except you're wrong! It's not genius at all it's in fact A grade weak-mindedness and very rude to boot.